Women: Does Stereotype Threat Affect Their Ability?
Women: Does Stereotype Threat Affect Their Ability?
Today, we live in a world where people of many races, genders, cultures, and backgrounds face typical generalizations made by everyday people called stereotypes. These stereotypes may also change the way people behave simply because the stereotype has a negative effect on their ability to perform a particular task. When people have fear of conforming to a particular stereotype that results in inadequate performance, they face what is known as stereotype threat. One common stereotype is of women performing worse than men on math tests. Now, is this because they have less capability in math or simply because the stereotype is stressed too much? An article of an experiment done by Steven Spencer, Claude Steele, and Diane Quinn called “Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance” in 1998 answers this question by conducting three related studies to see how stereotype threat effected women’s math performance. Study one was done to verify the stereotype that states women underperform on difficult math test than men, but perform equally as men on easy math test. The researchers used 28 men and 28 women that had already completed at least one semester of calculus with a grade of a “B” or higher. After obtaining the results, the researchers concluded that this stereotype was true with the participants in the research. Women did perform worse than men on the difficult test but they did just the same as men on the easier math test. However, the researchers question was what caused women to underperform on difficult test? They believed that women experienced stereotype threat, which affected their ability on score well on difficult test. Therefore, the researchers conducted another study to see how stereotype threat affected women on their test results. The study was similar to study one, containing 30 women and 24 men that were selected with the same criteria at the University of Michigan. This time however,
Today, we live in a world where people of many races, genders, cultures, and backgrounds face typical generalizations made by everyday people called stereotypes. These stereotypes may also change the way people behave simply because the stereotype has a negative effect on their ability to perform a particular task. When people have fear of conforming to a particular stereotype that results in inadequate performance, they face what is known as stereotype threat. One common stereotype is of women performing worse than men on math tests. Now, is this because they have less capability in math or simply because the stereotype is stressed too much? An article of an experiment done by Steven Spencer, Claude Steele, and Diane Quinn called “Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance” in 1998 answers this question by conducting three related studies to see how stereotype threat effected women’s math performance. Study one was done to verify the stereotype that states women underperform on difficult math test than men, but perform equally as men on easy math test. The researchers used 28 men and 28 women that had already completed at least one semester of calculus with a grade of a “B” or higher. After obtaining the results, the researchers concluded that this stereotype was true with the participants in the research. Women did perform worse than men on the difficult test but they did just the same as men on the easier math test. However, the researchers question was what caused women to underperform on difficult test? They believed that women experienced stereotype threat, which affected their ability on score well on difficult test. Therefore, the researchers conducted another study to see how stereotype threat affected women on their test results. The study was similar to study one, containing 30 women and 24 men that were selected with the same criteria at the University of Michigan. This time however,